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Multiple Factors Lead to Long Life

Posted on: Thursday, 4 November 2004, 12:00 CST

One of the great mysteries of life is why some people live to be 100 or older _ far beyond the normal life expectancy.

One possible reason is their behavior _ that they avoid serious health risks such as smoking, excessive alcoholic consumption and a sedentary lifestyle.

Another possible reason is that _ for whatever reason _ they escaped age-associated lethal diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes or, that they were at least able to delay greatly the onset of these diseases.

Jessica Evert of the Ohio State University Medical School and her associates studied the medical histories of 424 centenarians (101 men and 323 women with an average age of 102), who were participants in the New England Centenarian Study. The study recruits and enrolls centenarians throughout the United States and Canada.

The participants or their proxies (usually a son or a daughter) reported diagnostic information about 10 major potentially lethal diseases commonly associated with late adulthood: hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, nonskin cancer, skin cancer, osteoporosis, thyroid condition, Parkinson's disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

They also reported participants' alcohol and tobacco use.

Heart disease consisted of any one of the following: heart attack, cardiac arrhythmia, or congestive heart failure. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was defined as a diagnosis of either emphysema or bronchitis. Osteoporosis was defined by a physician's diagnosis of osteoporosis or a nontraumatic hip, wrist, or spinal fracture after the age of 50.

Based on that information, the centenarians were classified into three categories _ 38 percent (24 percent of the men, 43 percent of the women) were survivors who had been diagnosed with at least one of the 10 diseases before the age of 80; 43 percent (44 percent of the men, 42percent of the women) were delayers who were diagnosed at or after the age of 80; 19 percent (32 percent of the men, 15 percent of the women) were escapers, who had reached their 100th birthday without a diagnosis of any of the age-associated diseases.

The most common diseases were osteoporosis for women (56 percent) and heart disease for men.(42 percent). The mean age of diagnosis was significantly lower in women than in men for skin cancer, hypertension, and osteoporosis. The number of co-morbidities (more than one age-related disease) was greater for women (average 2.3 diseases) than for men (average 1.9 diseases).

This study indicates that many centenarians are able to cope with life-threatening diseases long before they become centenarians _ more than a third of them had been diagnosed with one or more of these diseases before they were 80, and they still survived another 20 or more years.

Delaying the onset of these diseases or escaping them entirely does not seem to be the only assurance of a very long life.

There surely are multiple contributors to living a long life, and avoiding a serious illness is only one of them.

The excessive use of either tobacco or alcohol did not differ significantly among the three categories.

What seems to be an indisputable contributor is one's genes _ brothers of centenarians are 17 times more likely, and sisters 8 times more likely, to live to at least 100 than the general population.

(Dr. Donald H. Kausler, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is author of "The Graying of America: An Encyclopedia of Aging, Health, Mind, and Behavior." E-mail him at dkausler2(at)aol.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)

© 2004 Scripps Howard News Service.

All Rights Reserved.

Source: Scripps Howard

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